Sharing the Beauty and Culture of India Through My Writing

I more or less stumbled into my writing career. I had never written anything more creative than a class essay or thesis for my master’s degree until I hit the age of 50. I call it my “menopausal epiphany.” Along with hot flashes, weight gain, hair loss, and insomnia, I discovered a deep need to write fiction.

For years I had been complaining about the dearth of romantic Indian fiction. Most every South Asian author seems to write literary novels, serious slice-of-life stories that are beautiful works of prose, but are lacking in plot and drama. So when I took up creative writing, I decided to try my hand at romantic stories with a distinctly Indian twist.

I was treading unknown waters with my unusual brand of ethnic women’s fiction with romantic elements, and I knew it was a serious risk. There was no guarantee that a literary agent or publisher would like this type of literature.  And yet I wanted to write about my culture in all its multi-hued beauty as well as its dark side. I wanted to tell stories that were realistic and yet dramatic enough to make fun, page-turning fiction. What I longed to create was “Bollywood in a Book.”

My Indian culture, with its arranged marriages, spicy cuisine, quaint customs like dowry, and a religion that has many gods and goddesses, offers great opportunities for unusual stories. I had so much fodder to populate my books with that I often had to curb my tendency to put in an overdose of cultural detail. India is a land of controversy, where women are allowed certain freedoms but not others, where women are often considered liabilities and men are cherished as assets, where marriage can occur between two people who have never known each other and yet they can live in a happy, lifelong commitment. India’s culture is beautiful and colorful, yet there are harsh, even shocking facets to it.

I set out to put all these elements alongside the colorful silk saris and lehengas, the pungent spices, and the vivid hues of India in my tales. The result is three books to date, THE DOWRY BRIDE, THE FORBIDDEN DAUGHTER, and THE SARI SHOP WIDOW.  A fourth book is slated for release in 2010.

The video trailer of THE SARI SHOP WIDOW can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9uRlbkxxes.  My writing, photos, and recipes are available on my website: www.shobhanbantwal.com

Thank you so much for hosting me on your wonderful blog.

Because I’ve written Young Adult novels and my name was once fairly well known in that field, I sometimes get questions from high school students who have been assigned to find out about potential careers by interviewing someone in a field that interests them.  These kids assume that a person can plan on writing novels as a way to earn a living.  They’ve been given a questionnaire to be filled out.  Rarely do any of the questions apply to me — or to any writer other than an author of bestsellers.

The first advice I have for any aspiring writer is to forget any thought of living on the proceeds — or receiving any money at all, for that matter.  Short of producing a bestseller, the only way of earning enough to live on by writing fiction is to have a backlist of many successful books that have stayed in print, which is becoming less and less possible nowadays.   In any case, it is much too far ahead to plan for.  Write because you have a story to tell and enjoy telling it, not because you hope to sell it.  The vast majority of writers have some other source of income, not just when they start out, but always.

The expectation of income, or even of publication, stifles creativity.  When I wrote my first novel Enchantress from the Stars I believed it was unpublishable because it was obviously not an adult novel, yet in that era it was too long and too complex for a children’s book (there was no distinct Young Adult classification in the 70s).  Yet the story took hold of me and I couldn’t leave it alone.

To my surprise, it did get published and became a Newbery Honor book, and in later years won several more awards; but it didn’t support me except for a year or two, quite recently, when subsidiary rights were sold.  My other YA books, which I wrote with publication in mind, got good reviews but were considered less creative and were far less successful in terms of sales.  Then for many years I had no more fiction ideas, which was frustrating because my publisher wanted more from me and even small sums of money such as my past books had earned would have been important to me during those years.

Long afterward, I got the idea for Stewards of the Flame.  It was an adult novel, unsuitable for the market in which my name was known, and I knew it wouldn’t meet the marketing demands of the science fiction genre either, since it wasn’t slanted toward readers with a lot of background in that genre. Again, I wrote without expectation of publication simply because I couldn’t let go of the idea, and I found my long-dormant creativity restored.  When it was finished I published it myself.  Write because you care about your story, not because you look on writing as a potential career.

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Sylvia Engdahl is best known as the author of highly-acclaimed Young Adult science fiction novels, one of which was a Newbery Honor book and a finalist for the 2002 Book Sense Book of the Year in the Rediscovery category. However, her trilogy Children of the Star, originally written for teens, was republished as adult SF, and she is now writing fiction only for adults.

Engdahl is a strong advocate of space colonization and has maintained a widely-read space section of her website for many years. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, and currently works as a freelance editor of nonfiction anthologies.

More information about Stewards of the Flame, the topics with which it deals, and its newly-released sequel can be found at www.stewardsoftheflame.com. Her main website is at www.sylviaengdahl.com.